If you can
trust two recent studies, the biggest problems facing kids today are
that beer is too cheap and cars have too many seats.

Back in the good old days, which for our purposes is defined
as any time before Regis uttered the phrase “Is that your final
answer”, it was easy to know what was wrong with kids. They were
lazy, spoiled, didn’t study enough, never cleaned their room,
chewed their gum too loud, forgot to wash behind their ears, and
didn’t put dad’s Playboys back on the top shelf of the closet
where they found them.

But those were the
idyllic days, known to sociologists as the Cleaver-Brady Era.
Nowadays kids are under so much more pressure, what with wondering
whether they’ll get into the college of their choice, whether they
can sell their Internet start-up to Microsoft before the government
splits it up, and which would be more appropriate for school today,
the Glock 9mm or the Smith and Wesson .38 Special. No wonder it’s
so hard to know where to focus our concern.

Luckily we have researchers to help us out. If you can trust
two recent studies, and I can’t think of a single reason why you
should, two of the biggest problems facing kids today are that beer
is too cheap and cars have too many seats. Believe it or not, people
actually got paid to come up with these conclusions. What I can’t
figure out is how I get their job.

To put it in
Einsteinian terms, beer equals sex and sex equals gonorrhea,
therefore beer equals gonorrhea. No one can accuse CDC scientists of
being overly complex.

The first of the studies was released by the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention, a government agency that obviously has more
money than good ideas on how to spend it. Apparently the scientists,
having run out of logical causes and effects to link, cut up little
pieces of paper and wrote random words on them. They tossed them
into a beaker, then reached in and pulled out “beer prices” and
“sexually transmitted diseases”, giving them their next project.
It’s a good thing they didn’t draw “job security” and
“useful work” because they never would have figured out that the
two go hand in hand for those of us who aren’t lucky enough to
work for the government.

Thus they hunkered down, held meetings, did research, and
came to the conclusion that cheap beer is a leading contributor to
the spread of gonorrhea in teenagers. Kind of makes you wonder what
kinky things kids are doing with those beer cans, doesn’t it?

Somehow the
scientists discovered that when alcohol taxes go up, gonorrhea goes
down. They explain this by saying that the cheaper beer is, the more
of it teenage boys can buy. The more they buy, the more teenage
girls drink. And the more teenage girls drink, the more often they
go down, which in turn sends the gonorrhea rate up. To put it in
Einsteinian terms, beer equals sex and sex equals gonorrhea,
therefore beer equals gonorrhea. No one can accuse CDC scientists of
being overly complex.

They concluded that
we can curb gonorrhea by raising the tax on beer. According to them,
adding twenty cents to the price of a six-pack would reduce
gonorrhea by about nine percent. This comes to just over two pennies
a percent. If that’s the case, why stop there? Why not slap a
$2.00 tax on a six-pack and stamp out gonorrhea completely?

Imagine
the other things we could do.We
could outlaw mobile homes, which would eliminate tornado damage in
this country and lower home insurance rates.

The problem with this idea, of course,is that no one likes taxes. That’s why we should take
another route and teach kids to appreciate more expensive beer.
They’d buy less and, if you’ve been paying attention, you know
the result: less gonorrhea. We could accomplish this though
education in the schools, much like sex education only without the
giggling when the teacher puts a condom on the banana. And in the
case that a few diehard libertarians like Bill Maher still think
gonorrhea should be available to the American public, we could
accommodate them by cutting out the middleman and putting it in
right in specially marked cans of beer, much like bread and cereal
is fortified with vitamins and Cool Whip contains one natural
ingredient just for yucks.

Another recent study, which amazingly had nothing to do with the
CDC, found that for teenagers, the risk of fatal injuries in an
automobile crash increases with the number of passengers in the car.
Having one passenger increases the chance of being killed in an
accident by 39 percent. Having three or more increases it a whopping
182 percent. This means that if your kid leaves the house with a car
full of his or her friends you should take that opportunity to kiss
them goodbye because if they’re in an accident they don’t stand
a chance in hell of making it home for dinner. The researchers say
this has nothing to do with the price of beer, but rather to more
people in the car being a bigger distraction, though I’m sure
that’s only because, not working for the CDC, the idea didn’t
cross their mind.

Finding indirect ways to solve problems is a great thing. If higher
beer prices will help decrease the incidence of gonorrhea, and only
allowing teenagers to drive two-seaters will save lives, imagine the
other things we can do. We could outlaw mobile homes, which would
eliminate tornado damage in this country and lower home insurance
rates. We could make it mandatory for TV talk show guests to take IQ
tests, which would mean the end of the Jerry Springer Show, Change
of Heart, and Farrah Fawcett being on David Letterman. And we could
make presidential candidates wear suits with bulls-eyes on the back,
which would weed out all but the most serious ones, shortening the
campaign season to, oh, about an afternoon. Hmmmm, I wonder if the
CDC has any openings.